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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason this is on the front page other than for it being seemingly down? There is no information in the link.

I am scratching my head as to why we are all gathered here. What am I missing?

Maybe I am just too used to software outages?

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There's a front page story every time google, apple or Amazon are down. I'm not sure telegram warrants the same publicity but it doesn't seem completely inappropriate.

The question is, why is the link to telegram's homepage? It's not down, and has 0 information on what is happening.

Maybe someone is doing a social experiment to see how many HNers read before voting?

I've honestly never understood why these sorts of posts (even for those larger companies with services everyone relies on) get so much traction on HN. I can very easily tell for myself when a site is down, and it's not hard to find most companies' service status page. Sure, if a few days later we get an interesting/detailed post-mortem from the company, I'd find that interesting, but "X is down" does not tickle me intellectually at all, and just wastes a slot on the front page. The inevitable speculation as to whether it was a bad deploy, a bad configuration update, a DDoS attack, whatever, is just not really interesting, though I guess (IMO unfortunately) enough people here find it interesting.

Of course, I'm here commenting, so somehow I got enticed to click through to the comments, so who knows what that says about me...

A bunch of people use telegram bots as a means of alerting themselves/other users (instead of emails and/or sms messages).

The production server might have a 150 load, with swap 99% full and 0 disk space left right now, and you wouldn't get any alerts from the monitoring software, because telegram is down, and it has "never happened before".

Following the events outage is usually a pretty interesting drama, to me.

Usually that at least comes with a status page or a news article about the impact or something. This just links the product.

Telegram is used by enough furries that the Telegram Twitter account jokes about it, and a lot of furries are in tech.

A potential major attack on an encrypted messaging service would be newsworthy to me, but there needs to be some info on what happened

Telegram messenger is encrypted? That's news to me.

There's an encrypted mode but it's missing many features and in my experience most people use it rarely or never. The default mode is not e2e encrypted.

It's as usable (or better) as Signal is, though.

The encryption ?

Yes, the encrypted mode.

It uses standard transport encryption for all communication. End to End encryption is available for direct messages. It isn't used for groups, where real E2E is very difficult and complex and AFAIK nobody does it well, and channels, where it doesn't seem to have much point.

My theory is: When something is down, people may be upvoting to show sympathy / trying to bring it up again. Who knows

Probably also because of geopolitical aspect, given Telegram's rocky past with Russian government.

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